How BoJack Horseman Created the Boldest Cartoon Episode in Decades

BoJack Horseman is no stranger to strangeness—that's practically the entire point of the bleak Netflix comedy, which focuses on an anthropomorphic celebrity horse voiced by Will Arnett dealing with depression and life in Los Angeles. BoJack has done several off-format episodes in its first two seasons, including an extended drug trip, a disastrous walkabout trip to New Mexico, and a time-bending look at three different groups leaving a party. But "Fish Out of Water," the fourth episode of the show's third season, which landed on Netflix last Friday, is perhaps its oddest yet: It's mostly silent.

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"Fish Out of Water" finds BoJack being sent to the Pacific Ocean Film Fest to promote Secretariat, the biopic he filmed over the course of the second season (and his longtime dream project). In the underwater city where the festival takes place, BoJack has two primary encounters. First, he sees director Kelsey Jannings (usually voiced by Maria Bamford), who he abandoned when she was fired from Secretariat, and tries to find the right words to apologize to her. Then, after being swept onto a bus by a pack of sardines, he finds himself alone with a baby seahorse and spends much of the episode trying to return it to its father (who works in a saltwater taffy factory far outside the city).

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Much of BoJack's formal restlessness comes from creator and showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who had decided he was interested in doing a silent episode while working on the show's second season. "At first, it was really hard to figure out how to justify it," he says, recoiling at the thought of a gimmicky episode where BoJack just doesn't talk for no reason, or even worse–uses title cards. "I didn't want to do something that was just silent for the sake of being silent,"

Luckily for the BoJack team, the silent episode problem dovetailed with separate conversations about doing an underwater episode initiated by supervising director Mike Hollingsworth, who had been pushing to explore that part of the show's world since the beginning of the series. "One night, in the middle of the night I woke up and shouted, 'Eureka! These questions answer each other!'" Bob-Waksberg recalls. "And everyone in the writer's room was like, 'Of course, did you not get that?'"

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There is a long tradition of animated silent comedy.

It's not like this was a totally new story-telling approach: There is a long tradition of animated silent comedy—Bob Waksberg points to, among others, Wile E. Coyote, Wall-E, and Shaun the Sheep. But his most recent televised examples of dialogue-free episodes are not only live action, they're also a little older: Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Hush" and Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place's "The One Without Dialogue," which aired in 1999 and 2000, respectively. There's a reason for that: The challenges of doing a silent episode are substantial.

To start, there's the basic problem of writing to convey information without dialogue—and the format change meant that the show couldn't rely on the considerable voice acting talents of its cast, including Will Arnett, Aaron Paul, Alison Brie, and Amy Sedaris. Even the procedures for making the show had to change—BoJack is usually dialogue-heavy and produced based on scripts, but production for "Fish Out of Water" had to develop from storyboards instead, reversing the process.

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This was less of a problem for credited writers Jordan Young and Elijah Aron, who each started their careers in animation (as an animator and development executive at Disney, respectively–both also worked on Comedy Central's reality TV spoof Drawn Together). "Coming from animation, we both have a very visual style of writing, so when it was time to write this stuff out, we were very specific about what we wanted," Young says. "We probably overwrote it because we saw it."

BoJack may be a lonely character, but he's rarely by himself.

Young and Aron were tasked with handling most of the plot difficulties, but many of these wound up being assets. The Kelsey story (and, more broadly, the entire Lost in Translation vibe of the episode, pushed by Bob-Waksberg) relies heavily on BoJack's contingent solitude. "If he could talk, he would have pawned that burden off as quickly as possible," Young notes. Aron adds that it would be almost impossible to figure out how to get BoJack by himself above sea level, a state "that's not easy for a celebrity." BoJack may be a lonely character, but he's rarely by himself.

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And beyond the dialogue-free conceit, "Fish Out of Water" opens up the underwater part of BoJack's world. Figuring out how this new culture would look fell to production designer Lisa Hanawalt. Hanawalt, who is in charge of the show's backgrounds, designs, and overall look (and is also a successful and talented cartoonist in her own right), found that moving the show to its temporary underwater home presented its own difficulties: "If you just lay blue on top of everything, it just makes everything look like mud," she explains. Even something as simple as adding bubbles to the backgrounds added up, in what she estimates was three to four times as much work as a normal episode.

While the BoJack animators can usually rely on the established backgrounds of BoJack's house, his restaurant, or Princess Carolyn's office, "Fish Out of Water" also required all new settings and background design. In the same way an episode of Friends becomes vastly more expensive if it films outside the standing sets of Central Perk or one of the apartments, animated series also need to create new settings—from scratch.

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That's part of why the look of the episode is so simple, but the underwater city is still a specific locale that feels like it has a thriving culture—even if BoJack never puts in the effort to understand it. The show's designers created a new, slightly unsettling font for the underwater signs, the city has its own currency, and the walls and TV stations and convenience stores are littered with ads that strongly evoke a loud, Japanese or Korean sensibility. (BoJack's frenemy Mr. Peanutbutter appears in several of these ads for seahorse milk, though he has no connection to seahorse culture.) Hanawalt and the writers freely admit the influence, though Bob-Waksberg is a bit more cautious about treating it as a one-to-one comparison. Citing the Bill Murray-starring Sofia Coppola film, he takes pains to avoid the suggestion that there is anything "weird" about this new culture. Instead, he says, "BoJack is the ugliest American there is."

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"BoJack is the ugliest American there is."

For Hanawalt, "Fish Out of Water" wasn't ugly at all. "It was a chance to really go nuts putting every underwater creature I love in the background," she says with evident joy. "I was like, 'We need a rainbow parrot fish.'" There were five different designs for the sardines that sweep BoJack away, randomized to prevent the appearance of too much sameness. In one particularly memorable moment, BoJack and the baby seahorse stumble onto a large collection of eyes, which turn out to belong to a giant scallop slurping a soda. (Hanawalt took some liberty with the design of the scallop, but it was the only creature she could find that had the right number of eyes for the gag.)

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But her favorite design for the episode is, of course, the adorable baby seahorse. All of the baby seahorses in the episode are designed to look like "alien babies," but this one in particular was lavished with attention. "[Raphael] specifically wanted it to be a naked one, so you see his little penis," she says, laughing. "It doesn't have to be grotesque—it's just nature." Hanawalt also points out the design is reminiscent of Harper, the fictional baby BoJack envisions for himself while on an extended drug trip in the show's first season.

This subtle connection goes a long way toward helping unpack the episode's highlight, a scene where BoJack and the baby seahorse bounce from sea anemone to anemone, activating natural bioluminescence and haunting, solitary notes in the process. Everyone involved in "Fish Out of Water" expresses awe at the way this scene turned out while downplaying their own contributions. Aron and Young took pains to specify the rough timing of the bounces and how the light would happen, while Bob-Waksberg highlights the contributions of Jesse Novak, the show's composer. "He's just as comfortable writing a goofy sitcom piece for Horsin' Around as he is writing these really subtle, almost unnoticeable heartbreaking stings for our emotional scenes. And in this episode, he really enjoyed diving in and letting the music tell the story."

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Bob-Waksberg's idea of committing to the story is part of why, though the ensuing sequence in the taffy factory contains an obvious homage to Charlie Chaplin's classic Modern Times (and there are several echoes of moments from movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and North by Northwest), there's no shot of BoJack stuck in gears. "One thing I'm proud of on the show is that we tend not to do direct references and parodies so often," he says. "There are other shows that do that really well, but we like our world to feel like our world. Even when the truth is a horse wearing a helmet underwater trying to save a baby seahorse from getting crushed to death in a freshwater taffy factory, we want you to believe in the integrity of that moment."

That "Fish Out of Water" manages to consistently nod to classic film without distractingly calling attention to it might help explain why the episode has received such thunderous critical praise. Though the BoJack crew doesn't anticipate doing another silent episode, they're (of course) pleased by the reception. Aron puts it in the simplest terms possible: "It's kind of nice to have an episode where you're forced to just stop and really focus on the show," to which Young replies, "That's frustrating, because I love to text while watching TV."

But the effect of having pulled off the silent episode seems even stronger for the crew. When asked about the anemone sequence, Hanawalt becomes verklempt: "It looked exactly as I first imagined it. The greatest satisfaction as an artist, and something I've wanted since I was a little kid, is to picture something in my head and then be able to execute it. It's exactly what I was thinking, I don't know how else to say it."